At every single company I worked for, I had to teach people to stop using div tag for everything. You can style things however you want, or even create components that the browser does not allow you to style (as long as you have fallbacks).
Then an accessibility lawsuit came in and suddenly people were very interested in the semantic meaning behind each tag
And the crazy nesting of divs 5, 10, or even 15 layers deep.
Like… _no._ Just hand your senior card back to the issuer, and go back to being a junior. If you cannot create a simple layout with only 2-3 layers of divs _at most,_ there is something seriously wrong with your front-end skill set.
The root cause always seem to be the same.
Pressure to get things done now. No time in the future to correct things. Possibility of getting fired for falling behind your peers that make the same shortcuts while you attempt to do things better.
It’s always an issue with management that doesn’t care about doing things correct. So the incentive to keep your job is always perverse.
Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean please?
You should let the defaults do their job, but they don't do very much. HTML's main semantic is to give things a hierarchical structure. Visually it's a free for all after that
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Semantics#...
no no no, different elements have different behaviours. for example, a button automatically has accessibility features like being able to tab to it and select with Enter key, which is essential for a screenreader. do that with a div and you end up building the functionality from scratch.
if all you care about is the visuals, sure, there's little difference, but once you scratch the surface you will have a poor product by not using the correct elements (where there is a clear "correct" ofc, sometimes it's subjective).